Review of Tracked by a Tattoo

28 Aug 2019 - Courtney Floyd

Published in The Athenaeum (16 Jan. 1897)

[Review began in A Marriage Mystery]

Madaline Garry substituted her own child for the legitimate son of Sir Francis Fellenger. But that Baronet before his death had had the rightful heir tattooed with a cross on the left arm, and wrote an account of the transaction and his suspicions of Madaline’s designs. To make things all right, he naturally concealed the document in a secret drawer in a cabinet, where it was a million to one against its ever being discovered. One this common-sense foundation, Mr. Hume has built yet another detective story. The murder in Tooley’s Alley is sufficiently mysterious, and it must be admitted that the multiplicity of characters and the reasons which involve almost all of them, one after the other, in suspicion of a guilty connexion with the crime, are most plausibly and artfully adduced. Not until the fall of the curtain does the reader discover that a doubt he had of the young solicitor, principally on the ground that there is no sufficient reason for his introduction, otherwise, is justified by the event. Mr. Hume’s book is good of its kind, but we wish even Mr. Fauks would talk a little better. ‘I’m agreeable’ may do for him in his professional capacity, but Rixton is supposed to speak like a gentleman.